How George Scaled to $72,000/mo With His Amazon Ads Agency

Last month we did 72,000. So now the goal is to get to consistent 84 in 2024. Because I know if I get to consistent 84k in 2024, we're going to hit in 2025, do a million a year. So that's the current goal, is to get to 84.

What's up, guys? Andre Hagel Jr. Here from client Ascension, back with another student spotlight interview here with my man George. I'm pumped for this one, dude. What's up?

What's up, Andre? Nothing much. Hanging out.

Let's do it. Let's do it. Well, we're sitting here on a Friday. I'm sure we're both coming off some pretty hectic and chaotic weeks. Managing clients, managing team, putting out fires. And so this is not a bad place to end the week with. Just doing a casual sit down interview, talking about all the success in hindsight that you've accomplished since joining the program. So real quick, if you could give us an intro of who you are and what your business is.

Yeah. So my name is George, founder of Extension E Comm. And essentially we help businesses that sell on Amazon grow on Amazon. So just holistic channel management.

That's awesome, bro. How long have you been doing that for? How long has the company been in business right now?

Like a year and six year and seven months.

Oh, okay. And then what was your experience before that? Were you doing anything Amazon or agency related or.

Yeah, so I was previously at Amazon which is why I started an Amazon agency.

Oh, no way.

Yeah, yeah. So I worked at Amazon for two years. I support. I was in the advertising like I was part of Amazon advertising and then I supported market leaders in the pet niche. So Petlab Co is a pretty popular one. How is their direct point of contact? Furhaven, Market leader in pet beds, Venable and market leader and chew toys. Like I supported all those brands.

Oh, wow, dude. Okay. And so basically what was the transition like? You realized that you had a lot more knowledge than what you were getting paid for and you wanted to just do this as like an outside consultant rather than working internally for Amazon. Maybe you're not allowed to say. I promise Jeff Bezos is. I don't know, but I'd imagine he's not subscribed to this channel. So you're cool to talk about Bezos.

Bezos is listening. Yeah, so I mean, I read on my LinkedIn 24. 7 too. So basically H2, what would have been 2022 in a big organization like Amazon, if you're a sales Rep. You're assigned a quota. Quota is assigned to you by Finance. Finance essentially runs numbers and says, hey, we expect you to do X amount of revenue. And if you achieve that, you get paid out commission and if you exceed it, you get paid out more. So I was coming off back to back halves of being in the 90th plus percentile of quota performance, and my quota got increased by 164% year over year, meaning that I had to grow my business at Amazon by over 164% just to get paid commission. So the numbers are something like 3 million up to 8 million. So H2, 2021, I would have had to deliver 3 million in revenue. In H2, 2022, I would have delivered 8 million to make the same amount of commission. I ended up missing. I did like, yeah, it's messed up. I ended up missing. I did like 7.87. And I knew I was going to miss just how. How outrageous it was. But I think one of the things for me that was the turning point was my manager was like, all you need to do increase your book of businesses. Spend by 4% every week for the remaining half. I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, just a 4% increase every single week for half.

So easy, bro.

So easy. So anyways, around that time, I started looking into, like, all the different options as to what I could do. And one obvious one was a lot of my clients had agencies, and I was like, I can do that. They're not doing anything crazy. And I have the sales and I have the technical knowledge, so let's do it. So that's how I got a relationship.

You just jumped right in. And so how did you go about, like, getting your first client and figuring out, like, the actual service you're gonna provide and the offer and all that stuff? I guess the better question is, like, how soon into that journey did you discover a program like Client Ascension? You join Client Ascension? Not from zero. A lot of guys join, like, not really having any clue what they want to sell or the service they want to provide. And that's something we can help with. But it sounds like you built the agency for a little while before joining, is that right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I probably joined Client Ascension a year and three or four months in to running my agency.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

And so where were you at at that point in time? Like, what have you done for that year in a couple of months?

Oh, so I just built up to the point of right around 50,000amonth. I believe when I was Coming in, I was right about 50ish month or so.

Yeah. Oh, geez, dude. So in a year and like two or three months, you built that agency from 0 to 50k a month.

I hit 20k a month in like 90 days or a month or whatever.

So like, obviously tough decision to leave a company like Amazon and go into something that isn't sure fire and consistent pay and whatnot, but the results were pretty quick.

Yeah. So actually the easiest part for me was 0 to 20. Everything after was way harder because. Really? Yeah, because it was just me and I had already been doing just me and I had already been selling for so long where I'd hop on and calls like, flex the credentials, know how to answer every single question. Like everybody just had faith in like the fact that it was me. But the second I started hiring people and like, well, you seem to know everything, but I don't know if I trust your team. So I had to figure that kind of component out. And then I never like truly managed a team or like built processes or anything like that. So then I was like, okay, I have this guy, but how do I teach him to perform? And that took me a long time. And then, yeah, eventually it just got to the point 50,000amonth, where I was in a situation where Basically all of H1 this year we were 45 to 55. It would just fluctuate up and then down and then up and then down. And really 2025 is like, I want to have a million dollar business. And it was like, okay, how do we go from there to 80 plus? I was like, all right, well, I have these issues, which for me at the time I felt was more churn related, like operations. Like if I could just get my churn down and maintain clients in, we hit 80k easy. It's just that we'd have some months where we'd have 0% churn, we'd have some months where we'd have like 20% churn. And then the next month it'd be 5 and the next month it would be 10. It's just all over the place, random results, random processes, everything just not flowing. So one of the things for client ascension as to why I joined was to solve that component from like an op standpoint. And then the other thing was to also learn how to increase lead flow. Right. Because there's two ways. You can either just get more clients or you can just turn them less often. But if you can get more clients and turn them up, soften at the same time, that's when you skyrocket. So yeah, that's what I was looking for.

Yeah, that's awesome, dude. Yeah. Again, I love this scenario and use case for you specifically because not enough people come into the program and are ready to like go that route of building a team and really optimizing operations and fulfillment because they still need to get to the 0-20k milestone that you achieve so quickly because marketing and sales, right? And so that's kind of like our forte, that's what we really, really are known for, is marketing and sales. But then I'm sitting here running Client Ascension, which is a seven figure company and list kit, which is on its way to being an eight figure company, simultaneously teaching guys weekly operations and it's like finally a guy like you like strolls into my calls asking like really high level questions that get me thinking again and speak to like higher level operations managing people. Like you were saying, like having really smart people on your team but not sure how to manage them and make them leaders and do the things that you do and instill confidence in your clients that if they're not working with you directly, it's still fine. They're going to get as much value as they would otherwise. So that was a lot of fun for me over the past couple of weeks to coach you through some of these things and we'll get into results. But one thing just for the audience and even for you, we've probably talked about this before, but like the way to think about fulfillment and how important it is is like yeah, if you figure out lead gen and fulfillment, great. But like if you're bringing in just enough clients and just enough sales to like cancel out churn, you're not growing, you're literally just stagnating. So great, like you've got leads coming in and you're, you're turning as many leads, you're not growing. And as you get more clients, you now have to get more leads because your churn rate usually doesn't really change. Like as you get more clients, your churn percentage doesn't go down. So you're churning more clients, meaning you have to bring in more sales. And so it's this constant like balance between the two. What I've really found since I spend so much time managing a CS and fulfillment team is if the fulfillment team can be self sufficient, it makes everyone's job a lot easier. And what I mean by that is not just focusing on how can we get churned down to zero because that's unrealistic. My benchmark for churn, dude, is if we have 10% or less monthly churn, we're fine. We're going to continue to knock it down as much as possible because every percentage makes a difference. But if it's less than 10, we can grow because we also focus on upsells. Meaning if we churn 10%, I want to upsell 10% so that churn cancels out just from what the fulfillment team is doing, not considering the new leads and sales coming in from marketing. And if we can generate referrals from our existing client base. Again, we are not so reliant on sales and marketing doing everything for us. And those are all CS related. And same with interviews like this, like case study interviews. Like you're basically turning a client that is working with you in fulfillment to an asset that sales and marketing can use to bring in even more deals than they were bringing in from before. So there's so much that goes into it, bro. And it's just, it's fun to talk about. But yeah, talk about some of the learnings that you had early on, attending the coaching calls, going through some of the content and how that impacted the business. Yeah.

So in terms of that stuff, really, for me, I was at the point where I just couldn't do everything in terms of like manage a team, run lead, gen sell. And I felt like we could have been growing so much quicker if I had focus. And then going back to what you mentioned is like, hey, you got there so quick because you already had some sales background. So like, okay, in the end, that was what I was thinking too, is like, that's truly what I'm the best at. So how do I get more time there? Well, to get more time there, I need to improve my ops by having leadership on the op side. So for you and your calls and just for everybody listening, really what we were focusing on was a how do we operationalize the upside? So how do we promote those top performers, who to promote and when you promote them, how do you help them manage their team and what things do we need to implement there? And then all the other little things in regards to CS that you were talking about. So things that are pretty simple and I don't know if I can drop the secrets here, but like something like.

Go for it, bro, go for it.

Something like recording calls. Like, it's very common for a sales team to record a call, but not that many people are thinking about recording calls on the CS side to ensure that your account managers know what they're doing and they're providing quality to their clients. So that things like that is what we're implementing on the CS side. In addition to promoting promoted three people in the leadership, backfilled all their roles. And then also, I mean we went from probably 10 people when I started in client ascension to 20 people in terms of like employee base. And 18 of those are all fulfillment. So what that does for me is now I'm just managing three managers. My account manager lead, my marketing assistant lead, my catalog manager lead. I manage those three, those three manage everybody else. And then that allows me now pull back to finally get back to doing more marketing and sales because then that's going to reduce churn while I can increase leads in and that's hopefully going to get us to the next revenue.

Level, which is what is that the million dollar mark that you're still after?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now we're at. Last month we did 72,000. So now the goal is to get to consistent 84 in 2024. Because I know if I get to consistent 84k in 2024, we're going to hit in 2025 do a million a year. So that's the current goal is to get to 84.

Hell yeah.

Dude, that.

Dude, that's so awesome. And again, it's like the unsexy part of business. Right. Everyone wants to talk about ads and funnels and marketing and sales, but like the impact of just focusing on ops and fulfillment for a couple of months can take a business, like you said, from 50k, which was stuck at a bottleneck, to 72k and now also present you a pathway to continue scaling to 80k plus by focusing on marketing and sales. Again, it's just for a time you couldn't focus on marketing and sales because it was bottlenecked by something else, which you've obviously figured out. Exactly. And yeah, dude, that's just so cool, like with the fulfillment side of things and promoting managers. And this never made sense to me like when I was first getting started in business of like, how do guys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have such massive companies, but it feels like they're not working as much as someone like us with like two employees at.

The time or whatever.

Right?

Yeah.

And it's like, it's because they're following this model that we've now laid out, which is you hire more people, but at the same time you're managing less people. And the way you do that is by putting leaders in the management positions.

Right.

Like you Basically hire people, they're in a team of like, let's say five customer success managers. You let them perform for a little while and then you, as the business owner or CEO, will identify out of that group who's the leader. And you go from managing a group of five to now managing just that leader who then manages the rest of the team. And it's like, dude, that's just the process. When you identify a team that needs to be built out in your business, you hire a bunch of them, you figure out who's the leader, put them in charge of the rest, and now you go to the next thing, the next business critical focus, which, like you said, is now marketing and sales again. So it's just really cool, man, like how that gets applied and also how it affects growth and revenue.

Yep. Yeah. And to jump in further there to manage those people properly, you just have to have the right KPIs in place. So that's actually another thing that kind of sold me on client ascension is you guys have like the 40x model in some sort of PDF document that I got sent after a sales call or I don't know where I saw it, but I'm a big believer in that. And something that they kind of push with incline ascension is making sure that you have what's called like a CEO dashboard or a leadership dashboard that outlines all the key KPIs within your business and then you assign them to the leader. So for my account management team, that's going to be churn and some other metrics. For my marketing assistant team, that's going to be the amount of tasks that they're doing per client per week. For my catalog team, same thing, it's going to be tasks per client per week. And I know if I'm hitting specific numbers that those departments are essentially within KPI. And then you break that down to the individual level where then we can tell, okay, if that department's not within KPI, what individual isn't within KPI. And then I can coach my manager on how to coach his rep. So that is something that's really valuable where you don't necessarily get exposure to that stuff unless you get taught it. And if you don't ever get taught it, you're probably not going to stumble across it yourself. So that's some of the stuff on the op side that has helped me then operationalize all of it where I can actually have confidence that the manager is doing what he needs to do and that the team is achieving the results they need. To achieve.

So cool, dude. It's, it's like, it's just getting clarity, bro. And, and the biggest takeaway here is just how to run your business. Like an actual business, right? Because you have to like do it methodically, you have to do it professionally, where you set like a CEO dashboard, like you pointed out, or like the business health audits or the four disciplines of execution, which is where we took inspiration from for that. And it's like you have to set KPIs because a lot of people will just hire someone and they'll be like they're not performing. And it's like, well, how do you know? Like how are you measuring performance? And it's like, well, they're just not doing a good job. They can't actually quantify. And then if they can quantify, it might be like they're not working enough hours. And I'm like, how is that relevant to their output?

Yeah.

And how is that relevant to the KPIs that you hired them to accomplish? It's not. And so you have to set KPIs, right? Like for a CS team, the KPIs I mentioned, what churn rate do you want to have? How many upsells you want to be generating? How many referrals you want to be generating? How many case studies and online reviews you want your team to be collecting? And then on a team level, an employee by employee level, how are you tracking those things every single day through things like end of day type forms, Every single week through things like team meetings, team trainings. And then if things need to be audited because goals are being missed or KPIs aren't being met, where do you go to look for that? You look at call recordings, you look at type forms, you look at their communication. In Slack, you could do a one on one call review and actually come to the call with data to say, hey, here's your KPI. Here's where you fell short. What's missing here? What can you do to improve and get back on track? Or maybe you bring in the guy that's crushing it and setting, you know, the standard for the rest of the team and you have him train this new team member. Right? So it's. We could go so much into the weeds and make this a whole interview about how to manage a team on the fulfillment side. But like you've already hit on enough points.

Yeah, it is what it takes.

Unfortunately, I don't think you could put a paywall on this on YouTube, but.

You should have no, to close it out though it is what it takes. Especially like because one thing for me specifically and the reason why the management is so important is I'm doing it by myself. So a lot of people out there won't have a business partner or won't know somebody who is also interested. So to Andre's point, initially you just do everything and you work so many hours. But once you get to the level where you can hire, that's where you don't necessarily have to have the business partner. It's still way harder. Like I would still rather have a business partner that just did all fulfillment or a team. Kind of like what client ascension has where they have multiple founders and they're all able to crush one individual thing or multiple things. However, in solo founders situation is you have to be able to. Whether it's sales or in lead gen or fulfillment, you have to be able to hire and you have to train and then you have to hire a team and then you have to train and you have to hire a manager and you have to train and if you can't do that, you're going to 100% plateau. And that's like kind of the Hormozi talks about beating the next boss, right? So if you just continue to killed by the same boss, you have to learn how to kill the boss. So like for me it's like I need to learn how to kill fulfillment and then get the manager to run fulfillment. And until I beat that boss, I will never get to the 84k. And that's kind of what we've been doing.

So. Yeah, anyways, that's, that's an awesome way to, to explain it. Shout out to Hormozi. He's always got, you know, nice metaphor for things like that. But the, the other thing I wanted to mention is like that's also how you hire and attract a players into your business. Because people always ask that question. It's like a generic question, how do I hire a players? And then I look at the opportunity they're hiring for the scorecard they created for the role and it's like there's no future pacing. There's nothing exciting about this role. You're just telling me what it is today. If a players. Think about like if you are an A player, right? Usually business owners in general are a players. What do you care about? You don't care about like just the opportunity as it is today. You're only focused on the future. Like if I can get to this revenue level or if I can get to this opportunity. That's what I'm working for today. Right. So by showing someone coming into your organization that there are opportunities to rise the ranks and get into leadership roles and have more responsibility. That's what people, that's what a players are truly looking for.

Yep.

Now, the problem is most agency owners will then say, well, how do I afford to hire a players? I'm not at the point in my agency where I can afford to do that yet. And I just think that's a misconception and a false belief. Because if you structure your pay around the KPIs that you're holding them accountable to being hit, it's either they hit them and you can afford to pay them, or they don't hit them and you can't afford to pay them, but you don't have to because they didn't hit them. And so talk maybe a little bit about maybe some things you've learned from the program on, on compensation and how to hire a players when maybe at the time you thought, well, I can't.

Afford that for hiring a players. I think the key is just what Andre just said in terms of what they're looking to gain. So each individual that I have that is now managing a team, all of those people have that growth mindset. And two of the three actually took a pay cut in order to be a manager. And the goal for them and the way I structured the pay, kind of like Andre mentioned as well, is it's based on if they perform better, they'll get paid more. So for my account manager team lead, he gets paid more per account manager that he's managing. So at each tier, 4, 6, and then a is where we cap it as his team grows, and his team grows only if we get more clients in. And that only happens if they are not churning people left and right, he'll end up making more. So long term, you know, if we scale this out, 3, 6, 9, 12 months, he'll be up, he'll make more money. Short term, he will be down. So he, he just had the right mindset around, like, I want to grow, I want to learn this skill set and I want to prove my performance knowing that in a year I'll make way more money. For my catalog manager, he's paid per total accounts. So he is most heavily incentivized by accounts not churning. Because we go from 33 businesses to 60 businesses, he's making twice as much. Well, 66, you get the point. Right? So the only one that didn't Take a pay cut is because it's an individual based out of the Philippines and they're all on hourly for that team. But yes, to Andre's point, none of these individuals were like, I need X cash. It was all about finding the right person that wants to learn, that wants to grow, that wants to develop and providing them with an incentive based compensation package so that as we grow, they grow. And if we regress, they regress.

Yes. Which is how the business actually grows at the end of the day. Because you have to realize these people don't care as much as you care as the CEO and the owner that the business grows unless you design it that way, which is what you're doing with the performance based incentive plan. And it's just so cool, dude. That's where you get all the buy in. And again, it's just a limiting belief that people have. I think in the agency space of like, I have to pay someone hourly or I have to pay them a base or I have to pay them full time or I have to outsource to really cheap labor. It's just not the case. If you think about it like us as entrepreneurs, like when you started the agency, like were you at a really solid base and consistent salary? No. And even to this day, probably still not true. A lot of entrepreneurs take pay cuts all the way to the point of an exit or just their entire career. And so that's the type of culture fit essentially, if you will. You're looking for in some of these a player leadership type roles. But dude, we're giving away way too much sauce.

Yeah, you're going to have to cut everything.

No, this is great. I'm going to use this as content inclined ascension as well. But no, this will go out on YouTube, obviously. I just think hearing your perspective on this stuff, it's just exciting for me because I don't get to hear it much. My focus of the business is fulfillment customer success. So I mean, I talk about marketing and sales all day too, but I really love this side of the business more than anything. So anyways, George, you're crushing it. Shout out to you for actually joining a program and going to the coaching calls. I know we've done a lot of work together on my weekly calls. You've sent even some of your leaders to my calls as well. There's huge value in that. And also that's great leadership from you. Right. It's like stick them into areas where they can learn and improve without you always needing to be there with them. Genius. And obviously the growth of your business is showing that as well, so keep crushing it, dude. And, yeah, I'm excited to see next year. I know your plan is to do a million, but I can see that turning into a whole lot more. So let's hope.

Fingers crossed. Thanks, Andre.

Awesome, bro. Thank you, George. Thanks, guys, for watching. Peace.